Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Historian, ed. Blair Worden

Abstract

The autobiography of Edward Gibbon, the historian whom Hugh Trevor-Roper most admired, was entitled Memoirs of My Life and Writings. Adam Sisman’s Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography (2010) carefully examined Trevor-Roper’s life; and this collection of essays, edited by Blair Worden (Trevor-Roper’s closest associate and literary executor), explores the writings and thought more fully than could Sisman’s study. Besides the introduction, the volume contains seven papers delivered at an Oxford conference in 2014, with six additional essays. Worden’s introduction surveys Trevor-Roper’s life and works and provides an overview of the volume’s chapters. Worden, and the other contributors, naturally emphasise the colossal abilities: the superlative intellect, enormous erudition and analytical penetration; the prodigious sponge-like memory, facility for languages, huge range and wonderful prose; the (discriminating) assimilation of other disciplines’ lessons (without what-a-good-boy-am-I pontifications on ‘methodology’ and interdisciplinarity). Worden counters the frequent ‘could-do-better’ criticisms, centring on Trevor-Roper’s failure to produce an unageing magnum opus: it was less a paralysing perfectionism than his ‘[t]emperament, talent and conviction [which] all drove him towards variety’ (p. 31). Further, Worden contends that Trevor-Roper’s work can still be valued for its ‘present instructiveness’ (p. 1)—precisely because it was not manacled to, and contorted by, particular, sometimes elderly, methodologies and approaches to the past’s reconstruction. Trevor-Roper praised Gibbon because the latter’s ‘philosophy never forced the pace’. By contrast, as B.W. Young’s thoughtful chapter shows, he disliked Carlyle’s works principally because the ugly philosophy so forced the pace that the Sage mistook ‘History for Prophecy’ (p. 239).